Last night a friend told me I was on the radio. Turns out it was the second episode of the BBC
Radio 4 documentary "Robowars" for which I had been interviewed some time ago. I feature in
the programme twice, once about 12 minutes in and second about 23 minutes in. They edited
my words a little bit so I'm taken slightly out of context (I was mainly referring to quite hi-tech
AI systems that may only appear in the future). However I think it's an interesting debate: if
people are stupid enough to start wars, should we use robots rather than people?

I received another batch of books from my publisher this morning. These are more translation
editions of The Book of Numbers: German, US, Japanese, and Brazilian. Strangely the Brazilian version has a
different cover image from all the others, and to my surprise it has a quote from Scientific
American. I was surprised because to my knowledge Scientific American never actually reviewed
the book. One of my PhD students solved the mystery - apparently my book was listed in
Scientific American's "New and Notable Books about Numbers" in May 2008, and the "quote" refers
to that list. Not quite sure why they chose to do that when we have plenty of other good quotes,
but perhaps in Brazil this is the best way to sell books... Anyway, the book looks very nice so I'm
sure Brazilian readers should like it.